The Value Sits Inside What’s Already Built
When I started building COOLIQ, I thought I was building a drinkware company. Over time, I came to see something else underneath the products: a body of knowledge and capability that could keep creating value long after any individual product had run its course.
That capability took years to build. It lived in the tooling, the materials we understood, the suppliers we trusted, the quality standards we had learned to enforce, and the intellectual property we had worked to protect. It also lived in the less visible decisions: which tolerances mattered, what packaging survived fulfilment, and how to get a finished product into a customer’s hands at a cost that made sense.
A catalogue of SKUs captured very little of that investment.
A product can have more than one useful life
Our collaborations with The Jilly Box made this especially clear. Each collaboration brought a different creative expression, audience, and commercial context to a capability we had already developed. We could make something new together because much of the difficult work was already in place.
The product still needed care and judgment. But we did not have to repeat every supplier decision, rediscover every manufacturing constraint, or rebuild the operating foundation from zero.
That changed how I thought about the life of a physical product. We tend to follow the SKU: develop it, launch it, scale it, watch it mature, and eventually replace it. The capability underneath can follow a much longer path. A particular colour, collection, or product expression may lose relevance while its architecture, tooling, IP, and operating knowledge remain useful.
I saw the same idea at a different scale walking through Nike’s product history in Paris this summer. Engineering and design knowledge accumulated over decades can find fresh expression through another product, collaborator, or generation of customers. The history becomes material for what comes next.
I think companies often underestimate how much of that possibility they already own.
More ideas make earned capability more valuable
AI makes it easier to explore what a product could be. A concept can be visualized before a sample exists. An audience can respond before inventory is ordered. A creator can identify demand without owning a factory or having a product development team.
Moving from that possibility to a product people trust still requires difficult work. Materials have to behave as expected. Suppliers have to deliver consistently. Quality has to hold. Someone has to understand the costs and take responsibility for the result.
Access to manufacturing has already become more widespread through global OEM and ODM networks. Finding a factory, though, does not give a company everything it needs to make a desirable product. Much of the value comes from judgment, experience, and relationships developed through repeated attempts to get things right.
As ideas become more abundant, I expect that earned capability to become more valuable in relation to them. There will be more possible uses for the things a company has spent years learning how to do.
Consider what different participants can bring to a collaboration. A product company has a proven design and the ability to manufacture it. A brand has intellectual property and meaning. A creator has an audience and a sense of what will resonate. A retailer understands a customer and knows how to reach them.
Combining those assets can create an opportunity none of the participants could pursue as easily alone. They can contribute what they have already built, without each having to build the whole business around it.
This is why I see collaboration as a way to develop and commercialize products, with implications that extend well beyond a campaign or launch.
The work between companies
The infrastructure for doing this remains fragmented. A collaboration can involve introductions, decks, email threads, specifications, contracts, approvals, and negotiations over who is responsible for what. Much of that coordination starts again with the next partner.
The assets may be reusable, but the process often fails to retain what the participants learned. Knowledge about what is possible, what has been agreed, and how the relationship works is scattered across people and documents.
Most commerce software becomes useful once a company knows what it wants to sell. Storefronts, payments, inventory, fulfilment, and analytics help it execute that decision. There is much less shared infrastructure for the work that precedes it when the opportunity depends on several organizations coming together.
That is the gap I’m working on with Airlab. My interest in it grew out of building products, investing in manufacturing, and seeing what collaboration made possible at COOLIQ. I want the knowledge and effort invested in one collaboration to make the next one easier.
Companies will always need to ask what they should build next. I think there is another question worth asking with equal care: what have we already built, and who could help us put it to a new use?
A product launch is one outcome of an investment in capability. There may be many more still available. Some of the most interesting opportunities in commerce will come from recognizing them.
Rewritten from an essay originally published on LinkedIn on September 2, 2026.